RAID

RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard drives that work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into independent ones through virtualization software. In any case, the very same info is kept on all of the drives and the basic advantage of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

Any content that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue functioning flawlessly until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the operation of the websites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the info which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the information which is being copied is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

In case you employ one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on SSD drives which work in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk in the RAID breaks down, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the malfunctioning one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any potential for corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ standard hard disks which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.